As we begin the year, many of us by using PQA and by just talking to the kids in order to set the rules and personalize our classrooms, let’s not forget the power of early reading to give a little extra clarity to our instruction. How can reading do this? How can reading be a productive and valuable part of our first few weeks of the year?
Our story writers can help us so much. No matter how simple the information we get from the Circling with Balls cards or other beginning-of-the-year activities that we choose for the purpose of starting our fluency based program, we can present all those random facts to our students in the form of reading at the right time, because our story writers are informing us about what is happening every day.
If Jimmy plays football (Jimmy joue au football américain) and Sarah reads (Sarah lit), and other facts emerge in the first weeks of classes, some of them very amusing, we can also write out the information that we get and then, in class on the next day, use those ultra simple readings as a basis for more verbal repetitions of what has been found out in class about the kids.
We can thus learn to use reading as a basis for more and more class discussion, which makes the entire process of starting the year out much easier for us, because when the kids can see what they have been hearing, the river of comprehension speeds up because the banks of the river now in the form of reading become narrower.
Reading this ultra simple material in a classroom setting early on, taking the trouble to write it out for each class (it only requires a few minutes at the end of the day) and comparing Jimmy to Sarah in what seems to us like an endless verification of student understanding via their yes or no answers, can go a long way in giving ALL the kids in the room confidence in what is happening.
Doing so will alleviate a lot of dicipline issues before they happen, because kids rarely act out in classes in which they are happy and experiencing success.